Posted
by
kdawson
on Monday November 06, 2006 @03:11PM
from the concensus-or-what? dept.

limbicsystem writes, "I'm a scientist. I like Al Gore. I donate to the Sierra club, I bicycle everywhere and I eat granola. And I just read a very convincing article in the UK Telegraph that makes me think that the 'scientific consensus' on global warming is more than a little shaky. Now IANACS (I am not a climate scientist). And the Telegraph is notoriously reactionary. Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong? Because it seems to be solid, well researched, and somewhat damning of a host of authorities (the UN, the editors of Nature, the Canadian Government) who seem to have picked a side in the global warming debate without looking at the evidence." The author of the Telegraph piece is Christopher Monckton, a retired journalist and former policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher.

But the fact that it is called Scenario A is because there are also scenario B and C. A is a 'business as usual' scenario, involving exponential growth in emissions. What happened since 1988 was nothing like that. If anything, industrialisation declined in the West, creating a situation closer to B and C - moderate controls to emissions.

It's not like this is secret information. NASA itself has discussed this.

The objective was to illustrate the broad range of possibilities in the ignorance of how forcings would actually develop. The extreme scenarios (A with fast growth and no volcanos, and C with terminated growth of greenhouse gases) were meant to bracket plausible rates of change.

By quoting this assertion, the author of this article has shown that he is either deliberately deceptive, or has not looked at all of the evidence. Don't listen to the regurgitated rants of this non-expert.

First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison.

Yes, but where did the UN actually say that CO2 ended the ice ages? How is the author reading their minds? Such a view would certainly be contrary to must of mainstream science, of course, so where's the evidence that the author isn't setting up a strawman?

The Co2 graphs show the reliability of ice core CO2 data as a proxy for finding out historical temperature levels, and also the potential for positive feedback effects if temperatures rise. They give an idea as to the sensitivity of the situation to perturbations.

They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).

So how does the author know, then?

They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".

This is pure and simply a lie. It's a lie, because all of these critics have ever show is the tendency for hockey sticks in PV01. But PV01 is a certain statistical consequence that is not the same as the actual reconstruction. Studies searching for the hockey stick tendency in the full reconstruction have come up with nothing, because there are other components in the full reconstruction that cancel out the first term.

This graph is comparing apples to oranges. The top graph is a global temperature anomaly graph. The bottom is the temperature of a relatively small continent, dominated by a warm ocean current. One is a average data over the world, and the other is strongly affected by local effects - such as the medieval warm period. The top graph is what global warming is talking about. The bottom graph is not relevant to the debate at all.

You don't need computer models to "find" lambda. Its value is given by a century-old law, derived experimentally by a Slovenian professor and proved by his Austrian student (who later committed suicide when his scientific compatriots refused to believe in atoms). The Stefan-Boltzmann law, not mentioned once in the UN's 2001 report, is as central to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein's later equation is to astrophysics.

From wikipedia:

The Stefan-Boltzmann law, also known as Stefan's law, states that the total energy radiated per unit surface area of a black body in unit time (known variously as the black-body irradiance, energy flux density, radiant flux, or the emissive power), j*, is directly proportional to the fourth power of the black body's thermodynamic temperature T (also called absolute temperature):

Stefan Boltzmann applies to a perfect blackbody. The Earth is not a perfect blackbody. In fact, not alot of things are. Doesn't it seem wrong to say that energy exposure always raises temperature to the same degree regardless of the object?

Stefan Boltzmann applies to a perfect blackbody. The Earth is not a perfect blackbody. In fact, not alot of things are. Doesn't it seem wrong to say that energy exposure always raises temperature to the same degree regardless of the object?

IAAPhysicist, and I can tell you that the Stefan-Boltzmann law applies quite well to an awful lot of things, even though they are not perfect blackbodies. For a perfect blackbody, the Stefan-Boltzmann law is exactly right. For most other things, it is a quite good approximation. The earth is far closer to a perfect blackbody than you might expect.

IAAClimatologist, and the earth-atmosphere-clouds system is not a surface and follows the Stefan-Boltzmann blackbody law quite poorly. That's why we have a greenhouse effect. Usually, we parameterize outgoing longwave flux in a way that the sensitivity to temperature is about half of what S-B predicts.
A reference to which I cannot provide a link without (c) violations:
Bintanja, R., 1996: The parameterization of shortwave and longwave radiative fluxes for use in zonally averaged climate models. J. Climate, 9, 439-454

You are correct for surfaces, reasonably thin atmospheric layers, pieces of clouds, and so on. You also get my point that the law can't be applied to a complicated, layered structure like our atmosphere, because the net result of all those small S-B blackbody and graybody fluxes from small layers does not necessarily lead to a net blackbody result when looking at earth from outside the planet. What is not easy for a nonspecialist to deduce from the original article (TFA in/.-speak) is that the 'lambda' b

As a someone with some graduate education in oceanography, I have a pretty direct interest in this, and I think you've hit on something very important. When Mann's paper came out, I was still skeptical about the anthropogenic nature of warming for several reasons. One was that I felt the uncertainties on many estimations were still rather large. For example, the lack of understanding on whether the ocean is presently a net source or net sink of carbon was a pretty big hole in the carbon budget. I don't think that one has been thoroughly resolved, but there's been progress.

Mann's original "hockey stick" paper is another such example. The criticism and counter-criticism of Mann's paper is a great example of good science in action. Van Storch and the other Canadian guys (McKitrick and McIntyre, one a geophysicist with an oil exploration company, and the other an economist) raised reasonable criticism about the type of noise fed in, and how the medieval warm period was treated. Others (e.g. http://web.mit.edu/~phuybers/www/Hockey/Huybers_Co mment.pdf [mit.edu]), including Mann wrote counter-criticism, Von Storch et all wrote counter-coutner-criticisms, etc., and notwithstanding the cute quote in this Monckton guy's PDF about "CENSORED_DATA", Mann's finding still looks to be an important one. Now models are models and not measured events, but the use of those findings was a pretty big step in modeling future climate change based on paleological proxy data. There are only a few credible scientists among this climate-change denier lot, and they themselves are pretty old guard (e.g. Richard Lindzen, William Gray).

For myself, the process around Mann's result did a lot to convince me that in fact the was certainty that humans are an important driver of the observed warming.

* Monckton mentions that there is a direct correlation between number of sunspots and grain prices falling, attributing it to the fact that more sunspots mean that the sun is hotter. Actually, that's wrong. Sunspots are cooler regions on the surface of the sun (3800 K vs 5400K on the rest of the surface), which means that the sun is actually radiating *less* energy in the visible and infrared spectrum. So his entire point completely falls apart with this basic item of astrophysics.

* Monckton categorically states that the temperature of the oceans has decreased, without using sources. From what I know though, temperatures have increased. Can't find a bullet proof link for it (was looking for NOAA timelines, but no luck), but you can use coral-reef die-offs as a good proxy. There was also a lot of hubbub when people tried to tie the increase in surface temperature of the Gulf of Mexico to the increased strength and number of Hurricanes that hit the US coast.

These are the two things that I categorically to be false. As for the rest of his arguments, they lack the data support I would expect from a debunking report. For example, why exactly did the ICCP remove the old temperature graph that showed in extreme fashion the warm and cold periods of the middle-ages? Besides, the temperature differences are still there - they are just not as blatant as before. There are also his 10 points which he thinks needs to be proven for Global Climate Change to be true, and what he thinks of them. Point 1 is a nice straw man, as someone pointed out already. Point 3 is another one, as people aren't arguing that the sun doesn't influence temperatures. They are arguing that the sun is less important than greenhouse gases. For the other points, I can give him the benefit of the doubt, even though all have significant problems with their wordings and his assessment of them.

In short, he might not be a shill - but there are enough problems in his "debunkation" to make me doubt the sincerity of his approach and his intentions. This might still be ok, if there weren't some massive errors in some of his arguments, which completely invalidate the points he is trying to make. As a result, I'm filing this under "waiting without bated breath to be properly ripped apart by people who know more".

Quite frankly, one reason I'm confident that we are in the beginning of Global Climate Change is that the only counter-arguments I see are poorly thought out, rife with personal attacks, lack data and make lots of statements without supporting data. If a group arguing for a position sounds like a bunch of idiots, I tend to take the opposite view.

Monckton mentions that there is a direct correlation between number of sunspots and grain prices falling, attributing it to the fact that more sunspots mean that the sun is hotter. Actually, that's wrong. Sunspots are cooler regions on the surface of the sun (3800 K vs 5400K on the rest of the surface), which means that the sun is actually radiating *less* energy in the visible and infrared spectrum. So his entire point completely falls apart with this basic item of astrophysics.

I am also a physicist. Lambda is dT/dP, evaluated at some temperature approximately equal to the earth's mean surface temperature. Taking the derivative and inverting, you get dT/dP = 1 / (4 sigma epsilon T^3). For epsilon = 1 and T=280 K, this gives lambda ~= 0.2. Wikipedia claims the average albedo [wikipedia.org] of earth is about 30%, which very roughly implies the emissivity epsilon = 0.7 (since a blackbody is 0% albedo, and perfect reflectivity is 100% albedo). I'm ignoring frequency dependence and other effects, but this is a first order calculation. With that value for epsilon, I get lambda = 0.29 for the aforementioned parameters. So far, things look good for Monckton.

Now, let's try to refine our estimate of epsilon to account for frequency dependence. The 30% albedo given by Wikipedia is based on reflection of sunlight, and is thus probably heavily weighted to the visible spectrum, which is where the sun's radiated power peaks. Earth's thermal radiation, on the other hand, peaks in the infrared, since earth is much cooler. Due to the natural greenhouse effect, the 30% albedo may not be accurate at infrared frequencies. Thus, we want to calculate epsilon', the emissivity of the earth at infrared frequencies. The natural greenhouse effect provides an excellent mechanism for us to do this. Let s be the solar constant [wikipedia.org], 1366 W / m^2. Multiplying by (1-0.3) to account for the albedo of earth, and dividing by 4 to account for the ratio of the earth's cross-section to its surface area, we obtain an average absorbed power flux of 240 W / m^2. We then solve the Stefan Boltzmann Law to determine the value of epsilon' necessary to achieve equilibrium, substituting Earth's mean surface temperature for T: 240 W / m^2 = sigma epsilon' T^4 ==> epsilon' ~= 0.7. Thus, it looks like our first estimate was good.

To recap, we use the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, the (measured) albedo of earth, the approximate mean temperature of earth, and the solar constant to estimate the effective emissivity of earth for infrared. We find it agrees with Earth's mean albedo. Using this value of the emissivity and the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, we estimate lambda as 0.29 K / (W / m^2), in good agreement with Monckton, and poor agreement with the other estimates he mentioned.

Since posting the above, I went and read the detailed calculations in the supplementary material supplied by Monckton. It turns out the problem is more complicated. It sounds like the "conventional" definition of lambda is such that it should arguably include not only the direct response to a forcing, but also the indirect response occuring due to feedback from the original response (e.g., increased CO2 increases temperatures, which increase evaporation, which increases airborne H2O, which further increases

Since we are all stating credentials here, I am a mathematician.The problem with the calculations above is that is is based on the measurements of the Earth's albedo as a whole. It is somewhat plausible, then, that the calculation gives a somewhat reasonable result for some sort of whole-earth lambda, including some certain adjustments for the change in pressure as we increase altitude.

However, this value is not relevant to GW study, because in GW we are not interested in an averaged temperature over all of

This was 1988. A large number of variables are undefined between then and 2000. Forcings, in this case, refer to carbon dixoide emissions. What the statement is saying is that because we cannot predict the economy for the next 12 years (or we'd be rich), what we will do is lay out a number of if... then scenarios, for what would happen with the climate if carbon dioxide went up, or if a volcano injected a bunch of sulphates into the air, cooling the earth down. Hansen, you see, was not an economist, or a vo

Well, if what the article submitter says is all factually correct, then there has been a large conspiracy to misinform and lie to the public about what is actually happening. Even if some of his numbers are unattributed or just plain wrong, there is a lot of evidence to support this. Hell, even if the "hockey stick" model combined with the omission of the warm period of the middle ages were taken as sole evidence, it would serve to suggest that there are greater forces at work.I, for one, would not dismiss

"Well, if what the article submitter says is all factually correct, then there has been a large conspiracy to misinform and lie to the public about what is actually happening."I agree. However, I reason somewhat like this,

A: What the submitter says is correctB: There has been a conspiracy.

A -> B!B (I don't believe in large conspiracies involving the UN and the vast majority of all natural scientists)---!A

This article is BS, and the "wow, this was pretty convincing" is just a seller line. I've seen a lot more convincing articles. I've also seen this article aggressively sold elsewhere in a similar manner. You know, I never heard of any successful global conspiracies on the scale that would be needed to conceal that global warming isn't happening/isn't mostly increasing due to C02/isn't increasing mostly due to our emissions... but I've heard of many successful astroturf jobs. I've fought for attention with press releases myself, but some people take it ten steps longer, without necessarily being open about it.

On the other hand, when the UN report suggested that lambda was.5c/W, while Stephen and Boltzmann calculated the constant to be.3c/W is pretty damning. If something is calculated and used in other instances, and is a significant part of everyday physics, why does it suddenly cease to be applicable when talking about global phenomena?

How about "because the Earth is not in thermodynamic equilibrium ?"

This bit was precisely what put me off the article. Apparently Mr Monckton (a journalist) is convinced that

You clearly have a political agenda.I mean you don't believe one can have a basis for conditional statements. So scientists who don't know if a serious earthquake is going to happen in California during the next 10 years shouldn't tell us where it is likely to be if it happens or what is a good evacuation plan if an earthquake happens.

The only reason your child molester example works out is because the accusation makes so many people emotional they stop being able to think. Moreover, if you both said "If

No offense, but I think you're doing little more than spewing vitriol.

Er, another way to phrase that is, "we made a bunch of sh** up." I'm shaking my head right now. That's EXACTLY what says! "Ignorance of how forcings would actually developed."

Would you prefer he really did make a bunch of shit up? Because that's what he would have been doing if he didn't make a bunch of scenarios. In the absence of a crystal ball, all you can do is figure out what the range of possible future events is, and then plug that into a model in order to bracket what might happen. Those graphs were never meant to be final predictions. The way things like this are used are that, if anybody has any information that can help predict the likelihood of certain events (say, a massive volcanic eruption) over a range of time, you can start narrowing the probability cone.

I certainly don't understand the assertion that this set of scenarios was wrong because reality turned out to be closer to scenarios B and C rather than A, especially when history turned out to follow the "future events" models used to produce those scenarios. To me, the fact that what has happened pretty closely matches the results he predicted for the hypothetical that turned out to be true means he was pretty damn right about these predictions.

What he did is pretty standard practise in everything from monitoring potential asteroid strikes to forming business plans and family budgets. If you don't like it, I'd suggest you come up with an alternative. The only other two I know are making firm assumptions about the future and proceeding with an attitude that these arbitrary predictions are prophecy; or failing to think about consequences at all and stumbling blindly into the future without a care in the world. Which would you prefer?

Hell, I can give you "extreme" scenerios that would "bracket" plausible rates of change without knowing a damn thing!Moot. How closely would they bracket them?

Note that the article in question actually misquotes and misinterprets NUMBERS and SCIENCEQuote edited to improve accuracy.

versus the typical, "W-w-w-well, what if THE SKY STARTED FALLING!!! WE NEED TO TAKE ACTION JUST IN CASE!!!!"I like hyperbolie as much as the next person, but pointing out that there are people who are standing out there screaming the end is near is not useful for arguing that people who are making much more moderate predictions and suggesting much more reasonable risk management policies are wrong. I don't think the US economy is likely to collapse without warning anytime soon, but that doesn't keep me from maintaining a nest egg just in case I lose my job.

Well, the iceless Arctic 'theory' is rather idiotic, if you think about it, because we have pretty direct evidence that it isn't true. I mean, unless you want to go tell a large number of polar scientists that the mid-low layers of their ice cores don't actually exist....

Actually, at the time he discovered it there was a belt on land near the coast that wasn't covered with ice. The Vikings had farms there for nearly a century (more? less?) before it got too cold for the crops to survive. It was never "hospitable", but it was endurable. For farmers, who supplemented their farming with fishing. Later this colony got frozen out.If you think about it, this seems to imply that the Greenland had just been warmer than it currently is, and that it was starting to freeze up aga

Luckily, his references link gives a nice summary of his core arguments:His stances follow the sentence, my counters are bold

ALL TEN of the propositions listed below must be proven true if the climate-change "consensus" is to
be proven true False!!!!!. The first article considers the first six of the listed propositions and draws the
conclusions shown. The second article will consider the remaining four propositions.
Proposition Conclusion

And the consequences of over reacting in the other direction could be just as scary. Instaed of cooking like Venus we freeze like Mars. Maybe we are hastening our doom no matter what we do. The science on both sides looks questionable. Big gaps in data and lots of assumptions based on their emotional baggage. I'll just keep waiting until someone comes out with a model that is accurate for a few years and they can explain why it is.

I'll go with the assumption that putting massive amounts of anything (C02) into a relatively stable equation probably isn't a good thing. Does the earth go through cycles? sure, but thinking we aren't influencing the direction of things is just folly.

So reducing our effect on the environment is probably a better plan than waiting till we find out it's too friggin late to do anything about it.

Imagine we are in a cooling cycle and all this CO2 we are pumping out holds off another ice age.

Not something I believe, but still possible. I personally think we should try and reduce pollution not only to minimize the effect in either direction to give us a chance for science to catch up, but also because I like clean air and fresh produce.

The bigger problem IMHO is over population combined with some kind of a cure to aging, Kim Stanly Robinson's Red Mars scares me the most.

I didn't say anything about whether global warming exists or not, or whether we're to blame or not.

What I said was that the assumed source of human caused global warming is carbon dioxide, which is not one of the pollutants that make noticeably unclean air. And if we're going to really reduce our carbon dioxide emissions your fresh vegetables are going to become more of a luxury. Cheap (and fresh) vegetables depend at the very least on mechanized farming (which produces carbon emissions) and in most cases some sort of transport (which produces carbon emissions).

So liking fresh air is irrelevant to the topic of global warming and fresh vegetables are something we may well have to sacrifice if the worst predictions about global warming are true.

Not if doing so is a massive economic hardship... Money very directly correlates to people's lives. Think of all the money it would cost to seriously reduce CO2 emissions, and imagine if we spent it on eliminating poverty, or other charitable works instead...

a better plan than waiting till we find out it's too friggin late to do anything about it.

Nah, we'll just use all the aluminum we can conveniently get our hands on to put up a giant solar sunshade. Oh, and seed the oceans with massive amounts of iron powder to encourage algae to grow. There's no way those could have any bad effects if we turn out to be wrong about global warming....

Let's see, on one hand we have an article that is full of utter nonsense. (Right, you expect me to believe - without any references - that the Chinese sailed the Arctic in 1421 and didn't find any ice?) On the other hand, we have NASA [nasa.gov]. I hope you'll forgive me if I choose to believe NASA over a bunch of loons who like to invent their own facts.

A) Reducing emissions doesn't mean an overall reduction in green house gasses - it just means a reduction in the rate of increase. So we're still increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses, just at a slower rate.

B) The environment doesn't turn around that fast; it probably takes longer than 30 or so years for our efforts to have a noticible effect.

C) Our measurement systems might not be precise enough to account for any differences, even if they did happen. AFAIK, a lot of the evidence comes from really old-school ice-core samples from a long time ago. Now, it's hard to prove a correlation (much less causation) with only 30 years of data, however precise. Climatologists are much more worried about (and, thus, I think, do more research about) trends spanning at least a century.

Without a control planet or two and a few billion years for testing, you're not going to get science that satisfies the flat earth crowd and their petrochemical bankrollers. Even then they're going to take cynical pokes at the methodology of the tests and a lot of smart people with good intentions are gonna be left scratching their heads.
The fact is, these climate scientists are doing what they can with the information they have. It's not easily testable, let alone repeatable... so yeah, it's bad scienc

This actually happens, as the increase in temperature causing ground soil to give up more C02. This is why it is an accelerating trend. That trend ends at Venus.

The trend ends at Venus? According to the article, it already reversed once, and that was shortly after the Middle Ages.

First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves

"When men have ceased to believe in Christianity, it is not that they will believe in nothing. They will believein anything." - G.K. Chesterton.

There ya go. From his preface. People believe in climate change because they have lost their faith.

If that's not his argument...why is this one of the first things he says?

Also, he cites the concept that all climate scientists are saying there's a problem so they'll keep their jobs...before he gets to any actual numbers.

Then he says this...

The snows of Kilimanjaro have been receding. So have the glaciers in Glacier National Park,Washington State, and many other (though not all) mountain glaciers in temperate or equatoriallatitudes. However, very nearly all of the world's 160,000+ glaciers (this surprisingly large figure isfrom the UN's 2001 report) have never been visited by humankind or measured in detail. They are onthe high, central plateaux Antarctica and Greenland. The great majority are not melting. They aregrowing.

This is not true.

Then he says.

I conclude that the rise in temperatures since 1900 has been far from uniform globally. Overall,temperatures may have risen at only three-quarters of the rate assumed by the UN in its 2001 report. Aswill be seen later, even a small discrepancy between the UN's assumed 0.6C and the true 20th-centuryincrease in temperature has a significant effect on the calibration of climate-projecting models, andhence on the magnitude of their projections of future climate.

Which is a classic mistake of mistaking weather for climate..and local for global.

Then he says it's not greenhouse gases...but the sun that is getting hotter.

I conclude that the Sun is very likely to have contributed rather more to the past century's warm period than the UN has assumed, and that assumptions about the contribution of greenhouse gases to warming should be revised downward accordingly.

So, uh, it's not even that it's "global warming" that has been debunked...it's that the U.N. is wrong about what is causing it.

(yes, the headline is wrong).

Then he goes into the calculations...none of which is data he personally gathered (because if he did, that would be he is a climate scientist...which would mean he couldn't be trusted...as he would then be being paid to study the climate).

If there wasn't such a huge incentive for industry to fund research that "debunks" the theory of global warming, I might be a little more willing to listen. But the fact is, you've got researchers on one side, and believe me, there's absolutely no upside to telling Americans that dumping tons of pollutants into the atmosphere is going to have a bad effect, so researchers on one side who are going where the data takes them and researchers on the other who are paid handsomely to find out that there's absolutely no problem with spewing ever-growing quantities of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere.

there's absolutely no upside to telling Americans that dumping tons of pollutants into the atmosphere is going to have a bad effect

I would actually disagree with this because (for the most part) we have a gigantic media circus that works by making sure everyone is too afraid to not watch the news (or read the newspaper) that will make you "famous" if you play into their fears; this strategy has existed for decades with the world being on the "brink of destruction" whether the threat was from Nuclear Weapons or Global Warming. Rational voices are usually silenced in favour of more radical messages to increase ratings and readership.

Now, there have been several pieces of evidence that bring into question the conclusion that "Humans are causing global warming" that have not been brought to public attention because they're in a field that requires much stronger proof than climate science does. The most damaging piece of evidence I have seen is that the cycles of heating and cooling are directly related to sunspot activity (the greater the sunspot activity the warmer the earth is) even though the irradiant energy arriving from the sun to the earth doesn't change; currently the sun is at a historic high for sunspot activity (historic from studying it for ~400 years). Even though we see this relationship (which could explain global warming) it can not be published until we understand why it would influence the temperature of the earth; is the electromagnetic energy from the sunspots doing something to the atmosphere that allows the irradiant energy to reach the earth more effectively?

Have you ever heard of the connection between sunspots and global temperature? Was this because the science isn't strong enough or because it is a more moderate explanation of global warming?

I see you've never looked at the budgets for groups like Greenpeace, etc. Research that backs up the idea that Global Warming is man made actually has more potential to generate funding than the opposite. Why? Because it can be used to guilt-trip citizens and government into throwing fistfuls of money both at the problem and (thanks to Kyoto) at the third world. As such, it's not only lucrative for certain organizations, but also achieves the aims of the "wealth-redistribution" crowd. If you don't thin

After reading the article, it sounds like this is a case of some fanatics in power over exaggerating the effects of global warming. But you won't be able to convince people until the average yearly temperature about the world has passed the previously recorded high temperature. Then some more people will believe and then some more and maybe it will be too late. If we steadily head upwards of 0.1C per ten years, it will get there though. I guess only time will tell.

If you're a scientist, why not give them the raw data & your conclusions?

Good point. What I'd like to see is a place where I can download the state-of-the-art models. That is, I want to be able to review their code, all assumptions going into the model, all justifications for the assumptions, and all historical evidence so I can replicate the predictions myself.

Since this is science, that information *should* be publicly available somewhere.

Since this is science, that information *should* be publicly available somewhere.

There are vast amounts of data available from the NOAA [noaa.gov], from tree rings, to coral, to pollen, to ice cores, complete with search engines and mapping systems to help you locate the dataset you want. All of it is freely available for download and analysis. As for modelling - a quick search pulled up this page [ucar.edu] which provides R [r-project.org] code for the MBH graph. Feel free to grab that, check their assumptions, and redo whatever you wish.

Because science adheres to the method of changing when new evidence comes out. This is not an attribute of religion. The end of the Christian Bible pretty much goes like this: "Anybody who changes this will not be going to Heaven."

I think the biggest problem with the whole climate change debate, is that the common man can't easily do all the research to come to their own good conclusion. So they have to believe whoever in the media has the best song and dance show. This is the case with a lot of things though so there you go.

So they have to believe whoever in the media has the best song and dance show.

The media nowadays will publish whatever sells more advertising. That means: whatever sounds most sensational. Forecasting climate catastrophe sounds pretty sensational. It attracts more readers, generates more controversy, and (most important!) sells more advertising. So the media will go for it.

You not only don't have to "believe whoever in the media has the best song and dance show"; you're an idiot if you do.

You can look at the prediction track record of the people who are quoted. And understanding Monckton's criticisms is not rocket science. He says the graphs produced by the global-warming doomsayers in 2001 suppress the medieval warm period. By golly, he's right. The graph makes it look as though the current warming is exceptional, but it isn't. Fluctuations happen. The warming between 1000 and about 1400 AD was more than the current warming, and it's mentioned in many historical sources (e.g. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]) and has been confirmed by many studies. You don't need calculus to understand stuff like this.

It is prudent to be alert to risks of changing the climate. Modest measures to reduce our gross waste of fossil fuels would be sensible. For example, if the US raised its gasoline taxes to European levels, Americans might be less inclined to buy SUVs. But extreme and costly measures seem foolish.

"The warming between 1000 and about 1400 AD was more than the current warming,"

Really? Let's look at the Wikipedia pages, as you suggest. "The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) or Medieval Climate Optimum was a time of unusually warm climate in Europe,"

Whoa. Wait a minute. What were those last two words? "in Europe" So anyone can read Monckton's article, do a little outside reading, and see that he is trying to argue that local climate variation disproves claims of global warming. Does that mean his conclusions must be wrong? Of course not. But, by golly, it sure sounds like he is more concerned about convincing his readers than he is about creating a valid argument.

The answer to global warming is *very* simple, and *very* well known. We just need to plant massive amounts of biomass to soak up all the excess carbon. We just need to turn the United States into a temperate rain forest- with enough variety to ensure tree survival and food production from the rain forest itself. Lock up that carbon in wood- and then use the wood to build houses- locking up the carbon for decades, maybe centuries...

If it decays, the bacteria feeding on it release the carbon stored in the trees/plants/whatever in the form of CO2.

If it is burnt, the carbon in the biomass is oxidized, and released in the form of CO2.

As much as I'd like the answer to Global Warming to be as simple as planting a few trees, it really isn't. Tree planting has its place, but isn't nearly as effective as reduction in man-made CO2 levels.

Yes, which then goes to feed more biomass- the idea is to match our logrithmic curve of carbon production with a logrithmic curve of biomass creation.

As much as I'd like the answer to Global Warming to be as simple as planting a few trees, it really isn't. Tree planting has its place, but isn't nearly as effective as reduction in man-made CO2 levels.

Actually, if you could just replace the area lost in the Brazilian rain forest in the last 3 years, you'd do more than 20 Kyoto Accords put together. Trees are *extremely* efficient in this, and some trees that we've found that grow here in America can survive up to 20 centuries if taken care of.

I find your signature to be incorrect. The first example that sprang to mind was the Michelson-Morley experiment, designed to prove whether the Luminiferous Ether existed as the medium through which light travelled. The experimentors were quite biased in favor of the ether's existence, and continued to experiment in order to find it. Despite running many experiments with many devices designed to eliminate sources of error that might hide the ether's existence, they never measured an effect larger than th

...but I don't look to newspapers for serious scientific research, I look to peer-reviewed scientific journals. But, that aside, the accusations in the article all seem to be things (relative role of solar forcing, the "medieval warm period", etc.) that have been discussed and dealt-with repeatedly in the literature, both as to their accuracy and their impact, there doesn't seem to be anything, on the first impression, new here.

"Sir Nicholas may well err on the gloomy side. And it is certainly impossible to predict precisely what effect climate change will have had on the world economy in a century's time. But neither point invalidates Sir Nicholas's central perception -- that governments should act not on the basis of the likeliest outcome from climate change but on the risk of something really catastrophic..."

I am not a scientist either and I used to rely on peer reviewed scientific journals. Yet sometime in the 80s they took a change for the worse. Suddenly it became apparent that making claims that always required further research were more important than coming up with sound judgement. I think computer modeling has opened a new door where self perpetuating studies and "sciences" can breed like rats. In a subject with very few absolutes (the weather) this is actually very easy. Throw out some sensational

Give me any conclusion on a topic involving a really complex process, and I'll find a way to poke a bunch of holes in it. I'll examine the process of investigation and nit-pick it to death, because no process is complete or fault-free. If necessary, I'll just go to the core assumptions and attack their validity. Easy enough.

Since none of the conclusions can be "proven", all we can do is go with our "best guess". In this case, the general concensus among scientists in the field is our best guess.

Except that in this case, the general consensus is usually based on worst case projections and copious amounts of rounding up. For instance a 1% annual growth in atmospheric CO2 is commonly used in projections, like the Stern report. The problem is that the actual rate is more like 0.35%. Now maybe it will double in the next 50 years to 0.70%, but that is still far different from saying CO2 will grow at 1% from today on. It grossly exaggerates the CO2 concentrations we'll be looking at in 100 years.

It's not really poking holes when you say, "How about we use average estimate instead of the doubling the worst case estimates". If you run the projections on average, or even plain worst case scenario numbers, you don't get a scary story. Even taking the UN's worst case scenario, you get a temp increase of like 7 c over the next 100 years, and that pretty much assumes that we make no progress in alternative energy, which seems pretty pessimistic.

All of the topics you mention seem to be areas where the unnecessary complexity was eventually discarded, to reveal a simple core truth. E=MC*2 is wonderfully, beautifully simple - that's its elegance.

Climatology is fundamentally different. It's a field, affected by huge numbers of variables. It's unlikely that you will be able to condense the problem down to a fundamental conclusion like "global warming IS manmade". Even if it becomes a devastating fact of life, and it wipes most of the life off of the

Poking valid holes in good science shouldn't be very easy. If your theories can have holes poked in them with little things like "facts" and "statistics", then maybe you should go back to the drawing board.

Poking holes is perfectly fine. It's part of the scientific process.

The basics of Newtonian physics are far less complex and much more testable than are the basics of climatology. Therein is the problem. I said I can poke tons of holes in the methodologies involved in making conclusions about compl

Granted I haven't had a chance to read the entire article yet, but it sounds like it's in line with what the climate scientists at my University have been saying for a while. Two things actually.

The first is that funding shapes science whether you want it to or not. If the general consensus is that global warming is happening, you're much more likely to get funded if you decide to do research on "why global warming is going on" or "what are the major contributors to global warming" etc. However, if you were to submit a proposal along the lines of "what if any effect has global warming had on climate change", good luck.

Therefore there's going to be a lot of science out there saying "Yes, global warming is happening and is the reason for climate change!", since that's what pays the bills, gets you published, and gets you invited to all sorts of posh international conventions on global warming. No one wants to invite the guy/gal that says "yes it's happening but it's not the cause, or certainly not the only cause behind global climate change".

Just my two cents. Keep and open mind, even when reading "science". At the end of the day scientists are human beings too, they have to pay the bills, report to a boss, have a reputation among their peers. Science is rarely about pure facts. The facts usually need to be teased out of the agenda, aggrandizing and ego of those doing the work.

but surely there are a lot of corporations and oil companies and the like that would certainly like to see research stating, "nothing to see here, move along." I imagine there is some decent funding to be found in the private sector for this kind of research.

"
Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science." [Emphasis mine]

OK, so not only is the American right-wing co-opting Evangelical Christians and 'values voters' to take away our civil liberties and conduct mass surveillance on the American public, but now hippies, greenies, and environmental scientists are also going to take away our freedoms by reducing greenhouse emissions, raising vehicle fuel efficiency, and sequestering carbon!?

Man, things are getting really weird when people on both sides of the aisle are starting to agree with Alex Jones.

I think I'd give this article a bit more credibility if the author wasn't so dead set on demonstrating global warming was evidence of a UN conspiracy to take over the world.Even if global warming does turn out to be wrong, there are *plenty* of ways for scientists to reach an incorrect consensus without resorting to black helicopters and secret cabals.

It's really annoying that politics has become so wrapped up in both sides of what should be a purely scientific issue.

whether global warming is happening. We know it is. We're recording it as it happens.

What is the issue is is this a natural process, a man-made process or a combination?

While we have evidence that warming and cooling cycles have happened in the past, this is the first time (that we know of) that the cycle has been recorded by man. If nothing else, it behooves us to study this phenomenon as critically as possible and determine if we are influencing things by our activities.

So no, global warming is not debunked. It is real and it is happening. The real question is why.

What is the issue is is this a natural process, a man-made process or a combination?

Why is that the issue? Are we looking to assign blame? Or should we be more interested in what to do about it? Cheaper to reduce it or cheaper to deal with the results? Or should we just ask more rhetorical questions? Anybody know for sure?

...And I just read a very convincing article in the UK Telegraph that makes me think that the 'scientific consensus' on global warming is more than a little shaky. Now IANACS (I am not a climate scientist). And the Telegraph is notoriously reactionary. Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?

The article referenced goes through several studies and papers and points out poor methodologies and statistical analysis that is likely fraudulent. From this you can conclude, these studies are possibly flawed. So where does that leave you? Can you logically conclude from this that global warming is not occurring or even not occurring faster than any time in the past? Of course not. Discrediting a study does not prove the opposite of that study is true. It simply provides you a reason to place more weight on other, more credible, studies.

From my reading I have little doubt that global warming is occurring. Just look in peer reviewed journals and other credible sources. It may not be as dramatic as some would like, and the dramatic, but ill-concieved, doomsday scenarios painted by the popular media are entertainment, not fact. The truth is, there are very real indications of climactic problems, which will probably be gradual, but may be practically irreversible by the time they are apparent to skeptics.

Just be careful of your sources and pay attention. Both industrial concerns and people working for government grant dollars have incentive to obtain particular results. Look for peer reviewed results from experiments and observations that have been repeated by numerous scientific studies. Be cautious of interpretations of this data by the popular media, who are more interested in selling ads than presenting the truth.

It's not just that the article goes through several studies and papers pointing out poor methodology. Bad science is often done by mistakes and may sometimes slip through the peer review process. But this talks about UN claims and people actively trying to cover up information. FTA: "A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "

To me this article isn't so much about whether global warming is occurring or not but how politics has gotten involved in this field and has affected the science that gets reported in places like the UN where policy decisions are made.

I guess I have a different world view than you do. I assume all studies are motivated by politics or cash and from what I've experienced of the scientific fields, this is not far from the truth. Researchers outright lie all the time to get grant money or more corporate fund

Unfortunately your personal experience does not add meaningful data to the debate, though that's a very, very common misconception. In fact, I hear scientists use anecdotal evidence to support global warming theory on a regular basis.Two reasons:1) Global warming is about the average temperature of the entire planet from year to year. There's so much normal variation and so many local weather cycles that observations from a single location are statistically insignificant. Your statement that Tennessee is ri

The reason the article seems correct and insightful is because of the limited scope. It doesn't take issue with the scientific consensus on global climate change, just with the recent report issued by the UN.

Oddly, though, instead of just pointing out why this report is wrong, it concludes that since the report is poorly written, then that proves there is no climate catastrophe.

I've actually come across other criticisms of the "hockey stick" graph that used it as a starting point for a discussion on good science vs. bureaucracy and the disadvantages of pegging all your arguments on a single "visual". (the biggest disadvantage? disprove the "visual" and that disproves your whole argument). Unfortunately that's not what we've got in this UK Telegraph article.

It doesn't matter whether man-made warming is real. It does get warmer, and the other riders of the apocalypse, namely storm, water and drought, are riding in in its wake. And oh, will they ever bring along the biblical set. With this in mind, it is our (as in mankind's) responsibility as a whole, to at least minimise our part in it, however small it may be. It is a fact that the enormous quantities of pollutants we release need to go somewhere, and that they do something, wherever they go. Those effects pose an incalculable risk to life on the planet.

So, no matter what lobbyists from either side of the fence may say, ignoring the problem (which is pretty real) is, as always, not the way to go. Governments and individuals are denying the greenhouse effect on various pretenses, which may even be valid in some ways. But when looking at The Big Picture, everyone who has not taken the short bus with the leaky exhaust, will clearly see a not so pleasant future that we may avoid by doing something, but that will definitely make life a lot less pleasant in the forseeable future if ignored.

I, personally, just hope that I will have a gun handy the day it gets too bad.

The consensus is about as strong as that of evolutionary biologists' view of evolution i.e. they agree on the general premise but disagree on the details. They haven't developme models that can fully account for observed phenomena, and they take different sets of sweeping assumptions to be able to come up with a manageable model.

If you think about it the whole premise of any prediction is gouing to be wrong: "If we carry on as we're going now..." is not possible.
China is industrialising. The price of oil will react to its scarcity. The percieved importance of rainforest is increasing as it becomes scarcer.
Regional climatic shifts like what started the 1997 Indonesian smog will become more (or maybe less) common as ocean currents shift.

We can (and probably will) argue ad nauseum about the relative importance of the historical CO2 and temperature records, sunspots, methane from the tundra, oceanic absorption etc. but the basic fact is that we're releasing huge amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere whilst destroying the ecosphere's long-established buffers.
Whether the system is stable unstable, metastable or whatever is probably impossible to predict with certainty. I would rather err on the side of caution. Those with a vested interest with us carrying on as we are would rather we ignore the doomsayers until it's too late^W^Wscientifically proven.

Every year the evidence for global warming gets more convincing.The scientific evidence just builds and builds.And when youve just gone through a summer in northern europewhen the tempreture never went below 30c for 8 weeks who needsscientists.

The really scary bit is this:The classic argument against global warming is that the climatehas always varied wildly -- sometimes it gets warmer sometimesit gets colder, shit happens.However historians have been patiently examining all the coolspells and they all correlate to drop offs in human activity.The last really big dip in temperature happened just after theBlack Death when approx. one third of humanity died.

Well I live in Canada, and I'm SERIOUSLY pissed off because these assholes have been promising me Global Warming for at least 6 years now, yet I spend 6 months out of every year freezing my friggin' balls off. Makes me want to buy an SUV and help the process along.

I am a global warming believer. I personally have been concerened about the possibility of global warming since the 80's.
A good site on the subject is http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics [grist.org] It contains a complete listing of the articles in "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic," a series by Coby Beck containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments are divided by:
* Stages of Denial,
* Scientific Topics,
* Types of Argument, and
* Levels of Sophistication.

We do however have a good idea of the effects that carbon emission restrictions will have on the global economy

We do, huh? Funny, because I don't recall anyone attempting this in the past, so I fail to see why you're so sure.

I would argue that enforced emission reductions would simply open new economic opportunities for companies providing solutions to lower emissions or increase energy efficiency. It would also reduce costs for existing companies, thanks to reduced energy expenditures.

I posted this in the "Snowball Earth" thread, but it applies here too.

At the moment the question seems to be "Are humans having a serious negative impact on the global climate?" This is used to reinforce the status quo, right? It's not our fault, what we're doing isn't the problem, so why bother changing what we're doing?

Shouldn't the questions be:

"Is the climate changing?""Is it changing in a way that will benefit humanity?""If not, how do we manufacture the change we desire?"

These questions should be framed with the idea that the climate is changing and will eventually wipe life as we know it off the face of the Earth. Eventually, something will replace all that biodiversity. But mankind won't be around to see it, so it behooves us as a species to guarantee our own survival by making sure the climate changes in a manner that allows us to continue to thrive.

There's also some discussion of it on a recent thread at RealClimate [realclimate.org].

Monckton's rant is just the usual background noise. It's not hard to make up a story by selecting evidence carefully. The hard job is finding a story that is consistent with all the evidence. While we eagerly await the fourth IPCC assessment, the third IPCC assessment [grida.no], the consensus of leading scientists in the relevant fields from 2001, is the best big picture we've got.

What some gadfly has to say should always be given due consideration, not less, but certainly not more. In the present case, not much.

... can somebody "debunk" the results from the EPICA ice cores? You know, the ones that record CO2 levels for at least the past 650 kYears, and conclude that current CO2 levels are nearly 2 times higher than they have ever been over the last 8 ice ages?

And then there was another set of results that showed how CO2 levels and global temperature are very closely related.

Before I'm willing to believe that global warming is bunk, somebody is going to have to convincingly refute the above evidence to the contrary.

"So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels."

A "sawtooth" implies multiple rises and falls. That gives us a chicken and egg problem. Whether CO2 increases preceded temperature increases or the reverse is determined by which one rises first on the chart. The one to rise first is obviously determined by when the timeline starts. Until we can make the chart go back to the day God said "Let there be CO2", we can't really know which came first just from a chart.

Personally I like the way that he criticizes the UN for not superimposing one graph over another while we fails to do the same.

I'm hoping that was a joke, because I thought it was fairly common knowledge (amongst those interested in this kind of thing, anyway) that JunkScience is maintained by someone in the employ of ExxonMobil and Philip Morris, a Mr. Steven Milloy, who also works for Fox News. Hardly a neutral point of view, or an authoritative source.

There are plenty more reputable sources to find your debunkings, most of them far preferable than "JunkScience".

1) Galileo invented the thermometer in 1593.
I don't trust any temperature data for dates prior to 1593.

Point #1 makes about as much sense as saying "the camera was invented in the 1800's so I don't believe in dinosaurs. The global temperature data over time comes from a multitude of different proxies of temperature that have been preserved in geologic records just like ancient critters have been preserved as fossils.

I haven't seen much (actually I haven't seen any) argument that the historical temperat

Are you serious? Please tell me this is a humorous comment and I am missing the punchline, because I cannot otherwise believe that such a non-insightful, non-critically thinking misinformed comment got rated a 5 on slashdot. The parent comment is anti-science, based on false dichotomies, and false information. I don't normally flame, but this is ridiculous - please go ahead and mod me down as long as you mod the parent down as well!

1) Galileo invented the thermometer in 1593.
I don't trust any temperat

Too bad you blew your wad too quick and had to post twice. I will go ahead and combine them here for convenience.

Hahaha.
You think I'm still reading your posts?
That's soooo cute.

Ummm. Yes, I do think you are still reading my posts - in fact, I think you are responding to them. At least that is what I see on slashdot when I check my account - two responses from, surprise, surprise, YOU. Again, you might want to try that critical thinking course - would probably do you a world of good. And yes, I th

The Canadian government changed. And scrapped the previous government's policy. Actions speak louder than words.

The policy changed because the party that took power gets most of its wealth from its Alberta base. This province's economy is entirely driven by resource extraction, especially oil revenues. The leading strategists of the Conservative party come straight from the US neo-con fold. The influence of Straussian thought is remarkably strong, because their lead strategist (who cut his teeth contesting indigenous land rights) actually studied under Levi Strauss at the University of Chicago, then took a professor-ship there for years. The right-wing, corporate industrialist agenda is to debunk climate change data in order to block moves that would affect their hegemony. It's perfectly understandable, but don't for a minute believe that it has anything to do with science, or even common sense.

If you meant to imply that there is consensus in Canada concerning this policy turn-around, perhaps you could explain why the New Democratic Party threatened to topple the minority government unless the Clean Air Act was sent back to committee for readjustment.

The recent policy change has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with the political imperatives driving the Conservative party. And that is exactly what the submitter should be considering, too: when it comes to debunking Climate Change, qui bono? Who benefits from this kind of attack?

The actions by the new government in Canada don't speak anything about climate change. They do speak a lot about the backing of the Conservative Party of Canada: Alberta and the oil companies. Think they want to promote the Kyoto Protocol and/or reductions in energy usage? Then there's the kow-towing to the auto industry in Ontario *sigh* That's s not even talking about how excessive and wasteful Canadians are with energy consumption (far more per capita than even Americans) - nice graph in fact about t

Anyone who is really conserned about CO2 emissions can do something about it simply by stuffing R50 insulation into the walls of their house. This is about 1 foot thick. The time to do it is during new construction (best) and during any renovation and failing that doing it room by room when painting for instance needs to be done.